BABY JACK Sample Chapter
Dear Reader,
Here are the first 70 pages of my new novel BABY JACK. The book will be published October 1 2006 by Carroll and Graf (Avalon NY). These pages are unedited! So forgive any typos. But I want to give you a little taste of my 300 page novel before it hits the stores. When it does I do hope you’ll want to read the rest. And please note my offer to book clubs on the book club page.
With every best wish,
Frank
Baby Jack
A Novel
By
Frank Schaeffer
© 2006 Frank Schaeffer
NO PORTION OF THIS BOOK MAY BE COPIED, REPRINTED OR DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER CARROLL AND GRAF (AVALON NYC)
Advance praise for Baby Jack
“ ‘I am the repentance that can find no forgiveness.’ Searing, heart-shattering, Baby Jack plunges the reader into the crucible of a son’s sacrifice and his family’s agony, as gold is distilled from the dross of their former brahmin lives.
“Highly topical for today’s treatment of United States military training and the conflict in Iraq, the novel tells at a deeper level the timeless story of young soldiers everywhere and of those who watch them march off to war. This is a tale of blood poured out, of mothers’ milk and fathers’ tears, of words spoken that can never be unspoken -- of passion, courage, cowardice, and shame. It is a chronicle of the brutal madness that attends grief, and the relentless imperative to discover grief’s meaning. In the end, neither death, nor time, nor God himself are as once imagined.
“Above all else, the novel bears witness to undying love, and its power eventually to redeem even our worst atrocities.”
Kimberley C. Patton Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion Harvard Divinity School and author of A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics.
“Families of American Servicemen and women deployed overseas should be heartened and comforted by this unique and compassionate novel. Civilians, on the other hand, will be treated to a bracing glimpse of what actually happens after that first, fateful trip to the recruitment center.”
Carolyn See author of Making a Literary Life
“Todd and God--characters as classic as Updike’s Rabbit--compete in post-9/11 America, a hilarious and redemptive tale of sacrifice and selfishness. The sharpest portrait yet written of post-9/11 America, at once hilarious, selfish, noble, tragic and redemptive.
“Schaffer updates the God of G.K. Chesterton, who struggles against self-absorbed Sarah and Todd, characters as memorable as Updike’s Rabbit. Boarding schools and elite colleges will ban this novel; it cuts too true about post-9/11 American upper-class society.
“We all know the characters - the upper-class family with the rebel who joins the Marines. Why? How could a young man go so wrong? God, in wickedly humorous and human garb, squares off against Todd, the snobbiest father since Abraham [in this] tale of selfishness and painful redemption.”
Bing West author of The March Up
"I had to read BABY JACK in private because it wrapped me up emotionally and left me wrung-out. Frank Schaeffer writes about duty and honor without irony, but without self-righteousness too. He draws a stark portrait of modern America, where most give none, and some give all. It's inspiring, poignant, and painful, because it's true."
Nathaniel Fick, author of ONE BULLET AWAY: THE MAKING OF A MARINE OFFICER
"Frank Schaeffer’s Baby Jack is a passionate elegy to the fallen dead of America’s wars and to those who mourn them. A scathing social satire as well as a tragic love story, Schaeffer tells a tale that is heartbreaking, redemptive, and surprisingly funny. As in his earlier novels, Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma, Schaeffer misses no opportunity to point out the ridiculous hypocrisies of his characters. A psychological study of the effects of war on those who serve and those who are left behind, Schaeffer probes the minds and souls of his people, allowing them to reveal themselves through diary entries and letters. Baby Jack is a highly original literary achievement where God makes a brief appearance, as does the Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet. This timely novel addresses one of the most important themes in American life today: who are the individuals who fight America’s wars and who are the ones who do not."
Charlotte Gordon author-Mistress Bradstreet—The Untold Life Of America’s First Poet
Part I
A few weeks after Jack turned seventeen he invited a Marine recruiter to our home. I was stunned by the intrusion. Sarah didn’t say much at first but her face looked tight. Up till that moment the talk about the Marines had been just that, talk. Worse, Jack broke the cardinal rule and invited him midmorning when he knew I’d be painting.
The man claimed he was a sergeant. He sat bolt upright at the kitchen table. He was wearing a kind of glorified doorman outfit. An enlisted man, not even an officer; officers need to have some sort of college. Even I knew that.
The recruiter brought these little packs of plastic cards with him, the sort of prop a second-rate child psychologist might use to coerce evidence from an eight-year-old in a molestation case. The cards had words like “motivation” and “discipline” stamped on them. They reminded me of the bible memorization cards my father used to leave by my bedside in his effort to interest me in the “things of the Lord.” He gave up after I worked them into a collage of centerfolds stuck to a sheet of plywood dashed with sperm and blood donated by my friends at the Boston Museum School. It was my version of Piss Christ. Only I called mine Sticky Jesus and no one paid attention.
“Pick the word that is the reason you want to join,” said the sergeant.
I cringed. How could my son have become someone who, after his exposure to the life within our home, after he and I had been such friends—after I allowed him to change high schools—even joke about joining this collection of victims?
Jack picked “discipline.”
I asked the recruiter what Jack would have after they were done with him.
“Have? I don’t understand you, sir.”
“Please call me Todd. What I mean is what benefits will Jack gain?”
“He’ll be a United States Marine, sir.”
“Todd. The name is T-o-d-d!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Todd!”
“Yes, si -- Todd.”
“Will Jack get to call everyone he meets ‘sir’? Is that the benefit?”
“There are other benefits. There’s the GI Bill. But,” the recruiter looked around our kitchen taking in the Subzero refrigerator, granite surfaces, the recessed halogens, and cherry wood cabinets, “I assume that getting money for an education isn’t why Jack wants to volunteer.”
“Maybe he wants the sort of challenge I found at Harvard Law,” said Sarah.
“Jack, why do you really want to do this?” I asked.
“You and I have been through it.”
“You can do a lot better. There are all sorts of ways you can stick it to me!”
“Maybe you want to go ROTC,” said the recruiter.
“No, I want to go enlisted.”
“We need to talk about this more amongst ourselves,” said Sarah.
“Maybe this is a good thing for somebody who would otherwise be in jail or pumping gas, but this is not for you,” I said.
“I’m joining the second I turn eighteen so you might as well sign the fucking paper!” shouted Jack.
There was a dead silence. Even the recruiter looked embarrassed. He shot Jack a disapproving glance.
Up to that moment Jack hadn’t said he would outright defy me. That he did this in front of a stranger made me feel as if, literally, I was falling. Sarah turned a bright pink. The recruiter began to speak but I cut him off.
“Don’t raise your voice to me, Jack!” I yelled. “If you want to mingle with Bible-thumping white trash then just get a job at Wal-Mart in Seabrook! You must find lots of your recruits there, Sergeant.”
“Sir?”
“Todd!”
Sarah looked angry. But she’s a big believer in the Rutherford decorum. So she tried to smooth things over.
“A Rutherford cousin did serve in the Navy in the Korean War. Maybe Jack’s thinking of him.”
“You never told me,” said Jack sullenly.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I said. “Jack...”
“There are plenty of parents who object to their sons and daughters joining,” said the sergeant. “I have two children and I want the best for them. When they graduate high school I’m not going to push them one way or the other but service is a good option.”
“How old are your children?” asked Sarah.
“Seven and nine, ma’am.”
“Jack,” I said, “...What the hell is going through your brain?”
By the time Jack said he wanted to join the Marines, and everything went to hell, we’d been in our house so long that if I got up in the night to take a leak I didn’t even bother to turn on the lights. The paths between furniture, the objects on the shelves, the dusty undisturbed places, were familiar as sunlight. We’d made our home our universe. We were settled.
Coffee first thing, then again mid-morning, lunch together on the days when Sarah worked via computer from home, dinner with the children—the “children” having dwindled to Jack when Amanda left. Sarah was still my model from time-to-time. And I was still seducing her in the studio from time-to-time.
Each room had its own season. Christmas belonged to our living room, full of overstuffed, dusty furniture. Sarah and I stood beneath the cracked plaster of the low ceiling, gazing through the windows as the sky behind the maples turned gold and made the bare branches into stark, black silhouettes. Thirty miles north of Boston the sun sets early in winter. Then from late December to late February Sarah would go to her office in Boston almost every day. I painted alone under the skylights in the barn.
Those winter months aged us. The air was cold, dry beyond the help of a humidifier. But sunrises in the kitchen turned Sarah into a golden reincarnation of herself, returned her to who she was on some long ago summer morning in New York as we ran side-by-side along the path around the reservoir in Central Park.
By April grim thoughts receded in proportion to the shoots of green emerging from the tired grass. The green brought the narcissus.
By late May there came a day that almost seemed like a good imitation of summer. Swathed in bulky sweaters we’d eat our first outdoor lunch on the screened porch.
In summer we concentrated on sun-ripened tomatoes and fresh mozzarella salads.
By late October we took our coffee out of doors, had it anywhere, even on the rocks at the bottom of the garden overlooking the marsh. Days were warm, the mosquitoes dead since the first frost.
A day or so after the recruiter episode I was forlornly leafing through our family albums. My many snapshots of Sarah were a reminder of how quickly time had gone by. Amanda moved back to New York and sent photos from NYU. I felt cheated. I’d never figured out how to be a good father to her, and by the time I had a clue she was gone.
Somewhere, I was sure, in our childhood pictures of Amanda and Jack I’d find the reasons as to why Jack was doing this. I thought I’d learned from my mistakes with Amanda, paid attention. I put work second, and curbed my temper. I was there for Jack. I spent half a life patting him to sleep. Whereas Amanda cried for three minutes or so then went down. I didn’t mind patting Jack. He was comforting to touch.
When Jack was four I set up a miniature easel next to mine and invited him to paint. Amanda was eleven and jealous. I had never allowed anyone except Sarah in the studio. We were still in New York so it meant Jack got to go to the studio in Williamsburg and Amanda didn’t. I was too stupid to see how much this pissed her off. At the time it seemed natural. Amanda was musical and Jack loved to draw. If I had to do it over again I would have asked Amanda if she wanted to practice her cello in my studio.
I cut up small plywood panels for Jack and gave him a set of sable brushes, and his own paints, not acrylics, but the oils I used, thirty-dollar-a-tube pigments. Sarah asked why. She thought at four Jack should have been using something less toxic, but I told her that future curators would be thanking me for steering the young Jack Rutherford Ogden to materials almost as permanent as granite.
One of the family snapshots was of the three of us standing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I asked some stranger to snap it as if we were tourists. I’m sure it was taken before we went in. Afterward I was too annoyed with Amanda to have bothered with a picture.
Every January a group of volunteers—mostly middle aged and elderly ladies working under the direction of the museum’s conservancy department—pack away the Neapolitan eighteenth and nineteenth century terracotta and wood silk-clad figures that decorate the Met’s “Angel Tree.” Thirty feet high and lavished with over one hundred and fifty, fifteen-to-twenty inch figures: beautifully painted faces gentle and innocent; swirling robes of silk, rich as thick smoke curling heavenward—a nativity scene to break even my pagan heart, angels, the holy family, wise men, shepherds and travelers. The volunteers put up the tree in November, then pack the figures away after cleaning each with sable brushes and special vacuum cleaners. The figures are kept in a temperature-controlled environment, held by supports, stored in heavy crates. Their creators would be pleased.
I watched the dismantling of the tree with Jack and Amanda. They were five and twelve. (Sarah was supervising the packing up. We were about to move to Salisbury.)
“Art survives because each generation protects it, loves it, values it, tries to make time stand still, or at least slow down,” I said. “These ladies are my heroes, guardian angels protecting art made by men who are now dust.”
“Will they take care of your paintings when you’re dead?” asked Jack.
“I sure hope so,” I answered. “You make sure someone does if I’m not around okay?”
“I will,” said Jack.
“If you want them to take care of your work you should paint something nice,” said Amanda with a laugh. “Why don’t you ever paint things that are beautiful, Dad?”
“Don’t be such a smart ass.”
“Dad’s pictures are nice!” said Jack.
My defender shot Amanda a furious glance.
How can my defender defy me? Who is he? I thought I knew.
Tall, tender, tough, smart, funny, kind, polite. Jack hated school. I would always imagine him moored to a desk, longing to sail away. And yet when he painted with me he never moved concentrating with a white hot intensity. By the time he was fifteen Jack was reading books about eastern religions and could quote the sayings of Lao-tse.
2
The article in the New Yorker wasn’t even about Dad. It was mostly about Lucian Freud, Wayne Thiebaud, and Steven Hawley. Dad got just a few paragraphs. He framed them.
Todd Ogden’s work represents an outstanding late addition to the Modern Movement which is in the process of being reassessed. When we look at American painting in the 19th century, we see that there were already overlapping attitudes toward the notion of the real. Its greatest exponent was Eakins in a painting like The Champion Single Scull 1871, which provides a reflection of reality that would seem perfect but for the fact that it is so consciously disciplined. But Todd Ogden gives us something else as well -- he conveys surprise at what he sees, as opposed to what we expect to see.
Some of his smaller paintings such as Virgin and Frozen Peas In Front of Old Painting 1983/4 produce this feeling of astonishment not just in the viewer, but one senses in the artist himself. For the majority of spectators the most familiar picture in this exhibition is probably the Female Nude in the K-Mart Parking Lot 1989/90. Did the normally outspoken Ogden actually intend the nude female facing the viewer to be a “blasphemous” Christ icon?...
Was that the bullshit they’d carve on Dad’s headstone? I wanted mine to say: “Jack Ogden, Marine.” We look for meaning because whatever peers out from our eyes isn’t happy to be bound up with a mortal body. We want to live forever. If life means something then maybe our hope that we’re more than a sack of blood and bones is evidence of an immortal soul rather than insanity.
I needed to cut out smoking weed, even on the weekends—didn’t want to pop the piss test. I heard the recruiters sometimes sprang a surprise.
When Dad lost his mind I’d play along. “Just smile and nod.” But then I was just tense enough to fight back, not just pretend to listen and then do my own thing. I was angry enough to fight him.
When he started in about how “dumb” the Marines were, I told him that William Manchester was a Marine. End of discussion. At least for me.
My seventeenth birthday party—Dad, Mom, Jessica and guests were on the new dock. Amanda called from New York.
Everyone was overdressed for the hot day so there were jackets hanging off the cast iron lawn furniture. People always dressed up for Mom’s parties. And of course Mom looked cool and collected in her pale yellow linen dress, and one of her big floppy hats.
The lawn was just cut so the garden smelled good. There were lots of boats on the river. Dad’s boat was one of the biggest so people slowed down and stared at it and the lawn stretching up from the riverbank to the sprawling house. Plus, Mom hired a band. So there was some pretty good jazz floating out over the water.
Anyway, there were about fifty people milling around. It was my party but they were mostly Mom’s friends. And because I left St. Martin’s early and blew off their track team mid-season, there was only Jessica and three fairly decent guys from Chandler.
Mom’s “friends” were people she always used this sort of occasion to get close to for her “causes.” That day she invited four Salisbury selectmen and their wives because she was working on getting an easement to build a gazebo too near marsh, and the mayor from Newburyport was there, because Mom was raising money for some courthouse restoration.
Dad and I were arguing, or as close to it as Dad would get, being it was my birthday and he really was trying hard to be nice. I pointed out that lots of artists, writers, political leaders--the sorts of people he respected, had served.
“They were drafted,” said Dad, and that that was a “different time.”
“No they weren’t. Okay, some were but lots volunteered too.”
The only other thing he could come up with was that I was meant to do “great things” and that the president was an asshole.
Then he started messing with Jessica, like somehow he disapproved of her now! I’ll bet if I had been headed to Harvard I could have been out all day, night and weekends with any girl and he would have loved her. And he had been busting my chops because I was smoking. I know I could have smoked three packs a day and he never would have said a word if I wasn’t saying I was headed to Parris Island. He called it “low class,” but never said that about his agent, let alone the guy who came up from the Met to see his stuff and smoked the whole time. And he knew Alice and me were going at it like crazed rodents when I was fourteen and she was seventeen and he didn’t give a shit! Back then I was winning track meets. I was sailing his boat. I was in a school he thought was great.
“Why would you want to only be a soldier when you could be so much more?” he asked.
I answered him like it was sort of a joke. But he knew, I knew, he knew, we really were fighting. So I was laughing and so was he, but we were staring at each other.
“First off, I’m not going to be a soldier but a Marine! Second, just because your generation screwed up Vietnam doesn’t mean history stopped. Third, even a paranoid can have real enemies.”
“To succeed in life you need to finish what you start,” Dad said in a phony relaxed voice.
“Track just seemed stupid,” I answered.
“ ‘Stupid?’ What’s stupid is the way you’re hanging around with that girl. Is she the reason you quit track? Did she get you to start smoking?”
Now the gloves were off but he hadn’t got the balls to go after me on the Marine thing, not on my birthday anyway, so he settled for picking on Jessica.
“I didn’t even meet her till after I left St. Martin’s.”
“Why would you go for some mousy little girl?”
“And you are a controlling bastard,” I said more and more mightily pissed off. “If I find her interesting, what’s your problem?”
“ ‘Interesting?’ Where’s your passion?”
Before I could stop him, Dad turned to Jessica. She was standing on the dock about fifty feet away talking to Mom where they were setting up the table for my birthday cake the caterers were fooling with. Dad and I were on the boat.
“Jessica!” he yelled.
“Yes, Mr. Ogden?”
“Come over here.”
Jessica boarded. She didn’t know you take off your shoes on a boat so right off he snapped at her and she seemed a little embarrassed as she kicked off her shoes.
She looked so beautiful in that long gray skirt and white blouse even if it was way too hot. Her black hair fell down her back almost to her waist. She reminded me of a Filippo Lippi Madonna, only with no pearls braided into her hair and she wasn’t blond. Jessica’s blue eyes look directly at you, and were never cast down demurely Madonna-style, but she seemed to know the same secret those Lippi Madonna’s knew. That’s what reminded me of the Lippi’s, Jessica’s inner peace, as if she was from someplace less noisy.
The way Jessica kept smiling even though Dad was being so rude was brave. She sparkled and was about as far from “mousy” as you can get. She was different from the other girls at Chandler, not afraid to love ordinary things. Everyone else was into being extraordinary. Jessica was extraordinary but didn’t know it. She talked about Sandy Point, and the way when the tide is out it looked as if you could walk across the bay to Crane’s Beach, and how she had always wanted to do that. And when I told her about the Marines, she didn’t look shocked or disappointed, just scared. And she liked Anne Bradstreet.
As Jessica stepped into the cockpit Dad started in.
“Let me tell you both about how I met Jack’s mother,” said Dad.
“C’mon Dad!”
No use.
“There was nothing rational about the experience. She seemed to have a shimmering outline around her as she walked through the gallery door. It was autumn and her cheeks were flushed. She wore one of those ratty Afghan coats everyone had in the seventies. It looked good on her! Her wool slacks were so tight you could’ve counted the change in her back pocket. And she was so beautiful! Her face is what got to me--those high cheekbones that pale Victorian coloring.”
“That’s it Dad! Okay, Jessica, lets go!” I said.
He grabbed her arm.
“Jessica wants to hear the end of the story, don’t you?”
“Why not?” said Jessica and smiled.
She was cool as a cucumber and looking right at him. Dad turned away first. Then he talked even louder.
I grabbed Sarah and kissed her before I even knew her name. Hell! I had her on the desk before I knew her name!”
He looked at us and smiled his shark grin.
I dragged Jessica away. She laughed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to explain Dad to her. I don’t think she got his, I’m-a-genius-so-I-can-say-anything routine.
“I’ll work him into a story sometime,” she said.
Jessica was wonderful. People find hope in beauty. If there’s no meaning, if there’s no soul, just eyes reporting to a brain, then our desire for there to be more is our madness.
3
We were at the start of the last summer before the Marine Corps. And I was preparing for the worst though still hoping he wouldn’t go. I needed Jack more than ever. He had defied me and time was running out. And not being from a military family I had no sense of proportion. All I knew was that Marines got killed in Korea, killed Vietnam, and killed in Beirut.
Jack was a poet, a philosopher, and a real artist! After we moved to Salisbury, I set him up to paint in my studio—a barn by the house, both built in the 1830s. Jack painted muddy little landscapes of our marsh and river views in a wobbly eight-year-old hand, and several good pictures of me at my easel.
Then there was the Duccio craze, when he copied a Duccio Madonna and even used gold leaf. He was eleven. I never enjoyed anything more than watching Jack paint.
Jack wanted to know all about the Duccio panels in Siena. After I showed him my slides he painted crucifixions. And he made me tell him the whole story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection because of those slides.
Jesus was a subject I had steadfastly resisted. It—“He” —gave me the screaming willies. But after explaining Jesus to Jack I began to incorporate Christ figures into my own work again. And those were the pictures that finally got me into the Met.
Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Uccello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Botticelli, we looked at them all, in books and/or at the Met. And Jack must have had cadmium yellow on his fingers. I was furious and screamed at him. There are still little yellow fingerprints on my Illustrated Vasari.
After Duccio came Sister Gertrude. Jack loved her self-taught “primitive” art, painted on just any old board or piece of cardboard with childish daubings of color--happy angels, bible verses, and of course those famous self portraits as the bride of Christ riding to heaven with Jesus in his airplane. Sister Gertrude painted herself dressed in white, her wedding veil flying in the wind behind her, her dark brown face set with big eyes, as she headed to paradise with her white Jesus.
We listened to a recording of her chanting her apocalyptic gospel messages accompanied by her tambourine. She’d given up playing the guitar after the Lord told her not to play any more. Later she gave up painting when he told her to stop painting.
“Why was the Lord so crazy?” asked Jack. “Did he hate art?”
I didn’t know what to say. I don’t believe in God so that meant I’d have to say Sister Gertrude was nuts. So I changed the subject and talked about how ironic it was that the only reason we knew about Sister Gertrude was because a Jewish art dealer took her Christ-promoting art seriously and made it—and Gertrude Morgan—into an American icon.
I’d talk about all sorts of bullshit while we painted.
When Jack was thirteen he finally came face-to-face with Duccio’s paintings in the little museum inside the unfinished wing of the Siena Duomo, the cathedral’s vast expansion that was never completed after half the population died of plague. By some miracle the Duccio room had no other visitors that day. Jack and I were alone with the figures of Christ and his disciples, the throngs of Jews, the Romans, the high priest, all painted in slightly green flesh tones and surrounded by the languid Tuscan landscapes, gold, strong faces and exquisite pastel coloring. Jack stood, staring at the panels.
“So somebody made something perfect!” Jack practically shouted.
After we got back from Italy we spent three months working at the marina—nights and weekends. By late October we were working under a tarp warming our hands over the butane heater every few minutes. Jack spent hours on his back reinforcing the connections between the hull and the deck. We added layers of fiberglass and strengthened the deck-attachments for the cables to support the mast. The two of us were planning to sail to Bermuda in the summer.
I carry pictures in my brain:
We were off Cape Hatteras with a lot of wind—the starboard rail was underwater then came up, foam gushing back into the ocean. The self-steering mechanism kept us on course. We were racing straight downwind and Jack’s long sandy hair whipped around his smiling face in the breeze.
I had growing confidence in Jack’s seamanship and he had absolute trust in me. We alternated three-hour watches.
I had no worries when Jack took watch. I even slept. Jack and I worked on radio fixes, dead reckoning, current effect, we looked at Jupiter—I taught him what I remembered about coastal navigation.
Bright blue sky, clouds mirrored in Jack’s lovely wide-set eyes, a dusting of freckles over his nose was growing more pronounced every day—sun burnt shoulders—Jack’s seriousness about doing every job I gave him and doing it well—my absolute satisfaction that for once something was going as well as I hoped for.
We sat in the cockpit, heads back watching the sky and ocean slide past. Jack’s back was warm from the sun as he leaned against me.
After Amanda graduated high school and left for New York, first for a child care job then NYU, Jack was like an only child. I almost never heard from Amanda. When she called she mostly talked to Sarah. I’d get snippets; assurance from Sarah that school was going well. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Amanda; just that I could only concentrate on what was in front of me—my work and Jack.
He draped his long arms over my shoulders when we walked off soccer fields. And that was when he was fifteen and tall as me, a time so many sons seemed embarrassed to even acknowledge the existence of fathers.
The Jack-and-the-Marines debacle started on September 11, 2001 when Jack was just sixteen. Thirty-seven of my works on paper were destroyed. As I watched the endless replays of the Twin Towers crumbling I imagined my art burning. Certainly this was insanely petty. Who gives a shit about art when a man and woman hold hands as they leap to their deaths? But who can visualize “thousands killed?” Who can grasp the end of the world?
I was mentally prepared to accept my fate: over time my art will forgotten. “Over time”--comforting words denoting centuries of gentle corruption, paper yellowing through eons, paint cracking, colors fading, not the entire Sarah Pregnant series soaked in jet fuel going up in flames as the gallery at the top of Tower Two was destroyed!
Amanda called from New York and told us she was fine. She was a senior at NYU. There was dust in the dorms.
Jack’s reaction was odd. He said he wanted to enlist. At first I humored him.
One afternoon, a few months after the disastrous visit by the recruiter, Jack came into the studio and sat down. I paid no attention. That was our way while I was working. And he was back to keeping the old rules, at least that day. He sat still for a good twenty minutes till I was done and turned.
Looking at Jack made my heart feel pinched. I was so damn angry and sad too. But I didn’t know how to express the sorrow. I just knew that I had failed.
“Dad,” said Jack in a quiet serious voice.
“Yes, Jack?”
“Dad, I’m really going to go through with it.”
“There’s still plenty of time to work this through.”
“I’ve done my thinking.”
“What if I said, if you join the Marines we will not speak again?” I said.
“I’d say, okay if that’s how you want it,” he answered calmly.
I took this as a challenge, one that had to be answered.
“Maybe I will,” I said.
“Okay.”
Jack regarded me steadily. His voice was quiet. I was trying to use my most reasonable tone. I smiled again. He still didn’t smile back so I stopped. I felt as if an icicle was being rammed up my spine.
“Why are you so ready to shit all over me?” I asked.
“You’re the one that sees it that way. Not me. But I’m going down there.”
“You’re just going to sit there and defy me to my face?”
“Call it whatever you want.”
“Then fuck you!” I bellowed.
Jack just gave me a hard look.
“If you go down there I’ll never speak to you again!” I shouted.
“Fine,” Jack said, in an infuriatingly calm voice.
“I mean it!” I screamed.
“Fine,” said Jack. “We’ll never speak again.”
I knew he was bullshitting, at least I hoped so. Jesus, I knew I was bullshitting! It was gamesmanship. I wasn’t man enough to call it off right then and there.
We left it at that. I hoped he’d forgotten the threat as the days passed. But nobody backed down, nobody unsaid anything. And then we stopped arguing about the Marines—for a while.
I was hoping that if I didn’t bring it up again the whole idiotic topic might just fade away, that maybe he’d just not go. And I’d pretend to not notice and let him back down gracefully.
Sarah was filling in college applications and leaving them in Jack’s room regardless of his rebelliousness. She was still begging him to go for early decision at Harvard.
And I was left wondering just why Jack was able to get to me so thoroughly and painfully. I’d climbed out of a crappy background to a good place. And somehow I guess, I’d always assumed my kids would follow.
I hoped he knew that after he got back from boot camp we’d speak again even if I couldn’t back down before he left. I figured he’d know it was like the times when he was little and I sent him to his room and said he had to stay there all day. After about a half an hour I’d come upstairs, shout at him some more for a few minutes then relent and release him from house arrest. I was counting on him knowing I was full of shit.
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With his last two works of non-fiction (Faith of Our Sons and AWOL) Frank Schaeffer established a thematic root note of sorts: The vast majority of the Baby Boomer generation is wantonly ignorant of the military and devoid the impulse to serve a higher calling, something bigger than themselves. And so when I first heard the basic premise of his new novel Baby Jack, I figured it was simply a fictionalized version of this thesis. Early in reading the book, I realized that I was right ... and very wrong. Baby Jack is not a derivative of Schaeffer's earlier work; in many ways his earlier work was simply prelude to this literary tour de force.
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